Let's take a look at the Sneak action.
At the end of your movement, the GM rolls your Stealth check in secret and compares the result to the Perception DC of each creature you were hidden from or undetected by at the start of your movement.
Success You’re undetected by the creature during your movement and remain undetected by the creature at the end of it.
So, when you Sneak, you roll at the end of your movement. and this determines if you're undetected during your movement.
Consider the case of a creature with a reaction that interrupts movement (similar to the Stand Still monk feat). If you Sneak past it and are successful, you're undetected and it can't use the reaction against you... but despite the movement coming from the Sneak action, you only roll to see if you're successful at the end of your action, after reactions have already resolved.
How is this supposed to work? Did the writer of Sneak just forget that reactions exist?
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Check out the "being stealthy sidebar" on 251. It may help. I think that the degrees of detection apply here.
Sneak
Failure
A telltale sound or other sign gives your position away, though you still remain unseen. You’re hidden from the creature throughout your movement and remain so.
Since you are hidden
HIDDEN
The creature knows your location but can’t see you.
This still allows a blind attack, or some other disadvantage, so standstill can still apply.
As a gm, I'd allow the player to start moving then interrupt. Describing, the creature with standstill noticing something amiss (its head tilts to the side, ear twitch, suddenly tenses up) and throwing a blind swing in the sneaky pcs direction halting the player as it makes contact.
The short answer is gm flourish of the discription I guess.
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It does seem like the purpose of rolling at the end is to commit the character to fully moving to the intended location before they know if they are successful or not.
It is a little awkward, but it seems like you would move the full movement, make your rolls, and then if you fail, the conditions for the reaction would trigger and you would retroactively resolve the reaction where it would have to occur...
Or you can just have players declare where their characters are moving to and then resolve all reactions along the way with that end point location clearly established on the table if that resolves the narrative aspects of the events for you
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I mean, I don't really see a bit of going back to be a huge problem, especially if the reason for it is reactions, since those often have a bit of "time travel" in them, just to a much lesser degree.
All that being said, Personally I just ignore the "at the end" part anyway and roll at the beginning. It's a secret roll anyway, so they don't know how good it is until something happens to give away whether they've been spotted or not. Which oftentimes won't happen anyway unless there's a reaction that triggers.
I think there is a problem if a Reaction causes one to reevaluate following through on their action. The obvious example is an AoO (perhaps a crit) at the beginning of movement that'll take you deeper into danger. You'd alter course if it were a normal Stride, maybe reverse one's path, but trying to be stealthy nixes that option?
IMO nope. (And that's ignoring other retroactive causalities that might pile atop one another until the whole deal's hashed out from the beginning anyway.)
Going back to the original rule I have to think it's an error based on an ideal, typical sneaking situation sans any other factors. But there are other factors, and to avoid wonky issues the GM should make the roll during the move, with the first creature who sees you likely giving that away by their expression and most certainly by any Reaction they use.
Also, one would think if Creature #1 used an AoO on you that Creatures #2, #3, & #4 would notice that and you even if you'd have normally succeeded against those three.
I feel like if you take a chunky hit in the middle of your sneak it is unlikely to make you want to change your course of action, because finishing your action hidden and/or behind cover (and probably out of melee range) is better than not when you're hurting. Even if the hit knocked you out, I could even see a GM ruling your skids to a halt at or near where you were aiming for.
If the reaction specifically disrupts the movement, then you'd get into weird time travel stuff technically but that's also easy to resolve.
I feel like if you take a chunky hit in the middle of your sneak it is unlikely to make you want to change your course of action, because finishing your action hidden and/or behind cover (and probably out of melee range) is better than not when you're hurting. Even if the hit knocked you out, I could even see a GM ruling your skids to a halt at or near where you were aiming for.
But you only know if you take a chunky hit in the middle of your Sneak after the Sneak at the end of your Sneak, because you can't be attacked if you're undetected.
I feel like if you take a chunky hit in the middle of your sneak it is unlikely to make you want to change your course of action, because finishing your action hidden and/or behind cover (and probably out of melee range) is better than not when you're hurting. Even if the hit knocked you out, I could even see a GM ruling your skids to a halt at or near where you were aiming for.But you only know if you take a chunky hit in the middle of your Sneak after the Sneak at the end of your Sneak, because you can't be attacked if you're undetected.
Yes, but if it isn't going to change your course of action it doesn't actually matter.
The rules won't always make sense if you strictly run them RAW, but PF2 had a much stronger emphasis on RAI. So just do what makes sense in the fiction.
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There is also the issue that you might get whacked a few more times by foes that you falsely believed could not detect you if you keep going the way you were going.
Of course, you would stop anyway if you are hit for enough damage or other effects that it is literally impossible for you to keep going. If you can still move, I suppose it would be fair for the GM to give you the choice between stopping where you are or continuing to move as planned.
There are two aspects to the game: the game mechanics, and the narrative description. While you are still rolling dice and making decisions and such, you are in game mechanics. Nothing happens narratively until all of those mechanics are resolved. After that, then the players may (or may not as the players see fit) describe the action in a narrative fashion. Which only has to approximately match the game mechanics results.
So yeah. The game mechanics involve choosing a path to sneak through, making the stealth check after that, then determining if the character was actually detected and provoked a reaction, which may change the outcome and decisions of the player after that point in the movement.
And once that is all resolved, then the players can describe what actually happened in chronological order.